essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
Below the wall the soil
leeches contaminants
from an artificial hill rising
out of the field like a wart.
the small hours are all about compost—
wanderlust of priceless larvae
& transcendent effect of unremarkable habits
Around December, our grove
of banana plants grew heavy, saba begging:
to be picked, coated in brown sugar, wrapped
in lumpia wrapper, and fried in sugary oil.
‘As I listened to music and wrote poems, the space came alive, became my balcony garden, and gave new life to me.’
you said it’s tradition in Spain that as the clock
strikes twelve we must scoff a grape a chime
one at a time, but quickly as any left over become
unsalvageable, each one a rotten, failing month.
our language, a softness taken root
a teaspoon of rain over us
as we greet this new life
A version of this piece first appeared on Trampset In April, the reality of the pandemic fades into the background as my family deals with our own internal crisis. The house is in Kemsing, a southern English village in the Kent countryside. It is nestled on the slopes of the North Downs, a range of…
Just a spoonful satisfyingly sears on the way down, tickling all the microvilli on its magic school bus trip through the body. A taste so tangy, a flavor so fearless. Anything but diluted, the way I’d always told myself to be.
I saw them. In the mind’s eye.
A vision once obscured, then clarified.
‘where reality and subconsciousness overlap and everything blends.’
Cubed potatoes, sliced onions—their oil bath
followed by a tender sauna.
We return to find
the magnolia still
bruising itself into blossom.
Compulsory heterosexuality rots the brain, has rotted my brain. I just wanted to undo, unlive it.
Then to discover we both go
first for that old chipped blue soup bowl
Is that love?
We physicians have never had a clearly defined mission. That mattered less when expectations were lower and we could do less. Now though, the reigning paradigm is grounded in basic science, excessively confident, inpatient-centric, and broadly focused on treatment of symptoms and signs, on diagnosis and therapy. The development of a new medical paradigm seems…
That night that the piano man and I first slept together was the night we discovered the pleasure of talking aloud about murder.
I spilled pinot noir on the bed sheet
and said I was a virgin.
Unlike a jellyfish, she has a brain but doubts her instinct for survival.
swoop siren, dive under.
The train leans through
the Highland line, Inverness
to Fearn, wheat either side.
This carriage bows for you.
“Ignorance produces hate, knowing is the best way to tackle ignorance, and empathy is the only path to love.”
I’ve tried planting potatoes since you left,
but they never grow the way they did for you.
Lorighittas are a type of pasta made in one small village, Morgongiori, on a side of a mountain on the east of Sardinia. Only the women of this village, and only some of them, know how to make lorighittas. A lorighitta is effectively a woven pasta made from a dough of semolina and water. Each…
Those are some peoples’ stories, some peoples’ histories, but they aren’t ours.
“You can call me Mr. S,” my ninth-grade biology teacher told the class on our first day, “for the sssss a snake makes.” Eyes sunken behind wirerimmed glasses, he had a wide mouth with no lips that I recall, and long, stubble-blue cheeks like leather stretched tight to the bone. While he lectured, a red…
We today tend to remember Ezra Pound (1885-1972) for the immense density and erudition of his work. Pound’s many preoccupations included Confucius, medieval China, Bertrand de Born, the Provençal period, ancient Egypt, the beauty of the Farsi tongue, and his fellow early twentieth-century modernists. Of course, we also remember many unpleasant things about the man,…
